What Is 10k Bitcoin Pizza?

This week marks the 12th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza. Bitcoin Pizza is commemorated as the first known instance of someone buying goods or services in the real world using Bitcoin–to be specific, 2 pizzas for 10k Bitcoin.

On May 18th, 2010, Florida programmer and early Bitcoin miner Laszlo Hanyecz posted on Bitcointalk.org that he was looking to buy 2 large Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin. On May 22nd, 19 year old Jeremy Sturdivant took him up on that offer, buying and delivering him the 2 pizzas.

At the time of Hanyecz’ purchase, the 10k Bitcoin was worth $41. Today that Bitcoin would be worth north of $300M, and at BTC’s peak price, it would be nearly $690M.

Everyone knows Hanyecz as the Bitcoin Pizza guy, but in reality he was an important developer who contributed a lot to what Bitcoin is today. Hanyecz contributed to fixing many early vulnerabilities, and he was the first person to release the Bitcoin code for Mac. Most notably though, he was the first developer to build out a system of mining with GPUs, the standard today. At the time, all mining was done via CPU, and even Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudo anonymous founder of Bitcoin, had hesitation in Hanyecz’ GPU plan.

Satoshi’s main worry was that speeding up the inevitable GPUs mining dominance would push out the average miner. Back then powerful GPUs were not ubiquitous in computers, so he was concerned this would lead to an arms race making the average person’s computer useless in Bitcoin mining.